Mercury and My Dad
by Lemon Fresh Cool Sprocket



I was standing over the kitchen table mindlessly flipping through a newspaper when I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. “Son,” my dad said, “come in the living room…it’s time we had a talk.” The implications of those words-Talk? To me? Your son?-triggered memories of the History channel’s week long “Prisoner of War” documentary that I had seen a month earlier. As my trembling legs brought me closer to the inescapable clutches of the living room couch, wild speculations about the cause of this talk began to run rampant in my head. Did he find the balloon of heroine stashed in my room? Did he notice the tattoo on my forehead? Did he find the mountain of stolen computers and televisions hidden in the basement? Had he noticed the assembly line of evil robots in the garage? Did he want me to kill someone? Or worse, did he want me to not kill someone? I was prepared for an intervention, swarming police officers sent to take me away to prison, or, at the very least, complete personal devastation. However, my cynical presuppositions seemed like manna from Heaven compared to the social atrocities my dad’s talk would reveal.

He twiddled his thumbs and made strange movements with his eyebrows to delay broaching his concerns. I knew this was serious. After clearing his throat one too many times, he looked at me, paused, and said in a completely staid “Al Gore” tone, “I think you’re eating too much tuna fish.” I had a ready excuse on the tip of my tongue and quickly replied, “Now I know it looks bad but if you just let me explain…tuna fish?” As I sat on the couch, waiting for him to add, “…and you’re murdering too many people,” he burst into a full-blown lecture about the dangerous mercury levels found in predatory fish. “I was reading an article,” he preached, “and it said you should only eat tuna fish twice a month. You go through two cans in a week!” My jaw dropped to the floor like an excited cartoon character and I stared blankly at his moving lips. They started moving slower and slower and his speech became muffled and unde cipherable. All I could do was hope the situation was an acid flashback and that the person in front of me was actually a bobble head doll. Needless to say, I was too disoriented to compile a coherent defense of my excessive tuna habit. My dad undoubtedly took my silence as a quiet protest and quickly became infuriated that I could be so blind as not to see the inherent suicide lurking in every third can of tuna fish per month. “This is not a game!” my dad shouted. “High mercury levels are very dangerous,” he added. I nodded like an obedient zombie and promised never to eat tuna fish again. In my haste to get out of the weird living room scene I cowardly neglected my duty as a passionate individualist and caved in to the pressure of “Conformist Nontunaeating America.” It happens to the best of us but, nonetheless, something drastic had to be done to remedy this infringement of my right to eat tuna fish with a clear conscience. I also enjoyed snuggling in front of the TV with a troop of boy scouts¾their sweaty little fingers feeding me delicious morsels of tuna. How am I supposed to have twelve-year-old boys hand feed me tuna fish if my dad and the rest of America frown upon high mercury levels?

With my weekly Boy Scout tuna parties in jeopardy I put my plan in action. I called in a favor from a former client of mine who was a writer for The American Health Journal. He owed me 20,000 dollars for back cocaine (Yayo if your black, Redemption if your Native American) payments and I was willing to wipe the slate clean if he would doctor some medical evidence and slap my pretty face on the cover of his magazine. The next month I proudly marched into the kitchen, holding the new copy of The American Health Journal and an open container of tuna fish¾a nine year old boy accompanied me, securely fastened to one of those “kiddie leashes” around my wrist. I threw the magazine in front of my father and gave the “kiddie leash” a firm tug for good measure. My dad looked over the cover: AMERICAN DOCTORS FIND TUNA FISH FIGHTS CANCER: SWEDES AND FINNISH REBELS AGREE. He was shell-shocked. How could people lie to him so viciously? He loved tuna and I knew it. For the last six months, since reading the initial tuna bashing article, he had ignored his overwhelming temptation to have an IV tuna bag mounted bedside, continuously feeding him sweet, sweet tuna. With pesky health threats out of the way my dad was free to enter his version of Utopia: a steady tuna gorging. I accompanied him for the surgery and the room smelled worse than a church bathroom on bingo night. That did not surprise me, humans are vile. However, when I found his skin had been replaced with fiberglass and his organs removed for fiber optic cables, I gasped…then laughed. Robot families, so apathetic, and we live forever while you just keep dying. It must suck being human and I can assure it absolutely rules being a robot, but like my great uncle Prin Ting Press used to say, “Don’t stop to pat yourself on the back, because you don’t have one…you’re a robot.”